The original game as invented by bored semi-drunk Scots was, I’m sure, a good laugh several hundred years ago with wee sticks and a random round thing.
The modern game and all its hideous capitalist/ classist cultural connotations is fucked.
The original game as invented by bored semi-drunk Scots was, I’m sure, a good laugh several hundred years ago with wee sticks and a random round thing.
Robin Williams did a great bit on this.
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I have it on good authority that golf was in fact invented by Bandrobas Took during the Battle of Greenfields.
🙄 modern home is just as accessible as any sport that requires gear eg hockey. Even more so. You folks just looking for enemies.
Didn't you know? If you're poor, you're supposed to be ashamed of it because it means you didn't try hard enough to not be poor.
Basically what they're really saying here is that anyone with money would agree with them and have no issues with the negative impacts of golf because it's something that all financially well-off people enjoy. Therefore, if you have any issue with golf in any way, it must be because you don't have the money to enjoy it, because every single person that ever lived is in love with golf, and the only reason anyone might have for not golfing is lack of funds.
Of course the nonsense needs no explanation, but that's the angle they were going for, and why they're rightly being ridiculed for it.
For someone who spends so much time talking about growing up in poverty, this is a surprisingly callous thing to say.
tell me you're a classist prick with more money than sense, oh no, wait, you've already done so.
Well, I recently learned of the existence of Excel competitions, so I’m not sure about the ‘most boring’ part.
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If you don't see the beauty in the orchestrated beauty of Excel macros and formulae, then there's no helping you.
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Nope, this is better than golf.
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That's horrifying, if you have the forbidden knowledge of what people only program in excel is capable of
I don't know if there still are, but back when you texted on a 12-button phone keyboard, there were texting competitions.
Mini-golf is actually kind of fun.
It's a lot of fun, and you don't need any nukes to enjoy it either.
Maybe not need…
True enough.
There's always that one hole where you have to hit the ball hard enough so it goes around the vertical loop ramp but not too hard so that it then bounces at the right angle to get anywhere near the area of the hole that's blocked by a whole bunch of strategically placed pieces of wood.
On that hole I would consider using a nuke.
Mini golf is superior and should be the default golf. As in, it shouldn't have a descriptor. It should just be called golf.
And what is called golf now should be called big golf or field golf or something like that to show how nonsensical it is.
Most of the times I played it, my group is enjoying themselves on holes 1-5, is getting tired of being held up by the group in front of us for holes 6-12, and is getting noticeably bored by hole 13, but feel like we have to finish it. It's a game that starts fun and becomes obligation.
Wait until you hear about the laws in place that guarantee them access to water their fields no matter the drought. Nobody has heard of an unkempt golf course.
Not just that, but I found a few golf courses in my city where natural habitats used to be. These place could have easily been changed into nature parks for the local residents to go wind down a bit, but noooOOOooo. Some rich assholes had to buy the land and destroy the ecosystem so they could whack a ball around some fucking grass into a little hole.
Would there be a difference to the sport if a part of the land was just left natural? I expect it would make the sport more interesting, atleast to the spectators.
It was invented in Scotland. Where there's grass everywhere and almost no trees. Why not just play in natural landscapes that are suited for the game?
I'm always interested in this take. By definition,.it's clearly a sport.
How do you define sport and how does it not meet the definition? It's a game of physical skill, mental concentration, and competition.
I have always viewed it as a sport involves and active defensive player and an overall greater level of physical movement
What about non-team sports, like running, cycling, surfing, skiing, etc. maybe there’s a defensive strategy but there’s no active defensive player. Are those also not sports?
Not really. They meet your qualifier of greater amount of physical activity/movement.
Sport has connotations of fast paced physical activity.
Games like Solitaire and Golf can be done by yourself and for most people won't be spiking your heart levels to a runners high.
Motorsports have no defensive player and do not involve much physical movement (unless you count the car's movement).
Giving a cat a bath involves a defensive player (the cat) and significant physical movement (depends on the cat's mood).
Giving the cat a bath (other than the weird one I had that loved water) is classified as a blood sport.
Part of the definition of a sport is that it accomplishes absolutely nothing useful at all, other than entertainment, thought about it and perhaps fitness. Bathing a cat is not a sport because it actually has a useful goal, I.e. cleaning a cat.
I would say that getting healthier and fitter is absolutely useful, and so is entertainment.
But anyways, some sports can be useful for training purposes (Ever heard of the Firefighter Olympics? It's really cool).
Also there's also stuff like people jogging/biking to go places, and sailing maybe can also fall into this category though I don't think it's a thing anymore. (IIRC in the 1700s there was a sort of sport where ships would race each other across the Atlantic to deliver stuff as fast as possible. Not sure though, take with grain of salt.)
There's still people who sail to get to a destination. It's a bit of a rich person thing, though. Even without a motor, boats are holes in the water that you sink money into. More so if it has to be ocean-going.
Fishing has entered the chat.
Definitely a defensive participant and an offensive participant, but way less physical activity like 90% of the time.
I guess I can see how someone who struggles to find their tiny dick might find masturbation to be very difficult.
Where do you draw the line between sports and games? Are sports competitive where games are fun? Is poker a sport? Are video games capable of being sports? What could be done to golf that would make it a sport? Are all sports games if not all games are sports?
These are the questions that keep me up at night.
Not saying I hold this opinion myself but I think people that say this usually draw the line to physical exertion being required.
Any sport can be played while drinking a beer if you put your mind to it and believe in yourself.
Oh that just made him angry, I always added that no sport has the winner of a major tournament in their mid 40s.
I mean... Tom Brady was a super bowl MVP in his 40s.
Chris Chelios won a Stanley Cup in his 40s.
But your point is well taken nonetheless.
But that's a team sport though. If we compare that to tennis the oldest tournament winner is Rosewall in the 70s at 37 years old and more recently Federer in 2018 at 36 years old.
Sports that are more based on endurance than sprinting tend to have older people who do well. Mid-40s is pushing it for championship level, but you can still be competitive at that stage, and still participate well into old age if you don't have any major health/injury issues.
I actually get exhausted playing golf - but that's because I'm BAD at it. Apparently I put too much force into my swing. Every time I've tried to play I get told to relax and "let the club to the work".
So they literally have these weighted sticks to reduce the amount of frickin effort required to hit the ball.
It's not a sport. It's an ANTI-sport. The less you try the better you'll be.
Can you imagine if we had an Olympic running sport to see who the slowest runner was? That's what golf is. Get the weakest, limpest, vitamin-defficient humans and see how accurately they can hit a tiny ball into a hole.
It was invented by the Scots as a joke against the English while they all go and compete in proper sports like caber tossing and hammer throwing.
Or to keep it short, know that John Daly is one of the greats of the sport. Look up a picture of John Daly dated any time in the last 30 years, and you'll know how hilarious that is.
And people complain that Starcraft isn't a sport.
The golf course near me has spent the last month about a foot underwater.
I have never been so smug. I hope it's ruined.
every golf course could be a lovely botanical garden/park or arboretum, with little paths every which way and carefully crafted scenery to make you feel like you're inside a disney movie
You see this?
I used to hike along the coast there quite regularly but someone decided it was much better to turn the whole thing into a gulf course and to illegally block access to locals.
Edit: Of course they also chose the driest part of the island.
Where is this? California has strict regulations about the actual beach access. So e.g. Pebble Beach is in one of the most beautiful locations in all of Northern California, ridiculously expensive and nearly impossible to play as a mortal, but you can still go drive around 17 mile drive through the course and walk along the coastal trails for free.
It's in st Lucia in the Caribbean.
There is regulations for beach access too here where all the coastline need to be accessible to the public.
So far with this particular resort they are doing everything they can to discourage people from coming in and showed a strong disdain for the local community.
AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING ON EACH SIDE. Seattle estimated they could solve the housing crisis by closing a handful of their muni courses (leaving multiple municipal and a dozen private courses in the area) and building medium density housing there. Solving a critical need by getting rid of a few locations for a dying sport:
https://www.theurbanist.org/2019/06/12/unlike-seattle-golf-really-is-dying/
It's a waste of space otherwise.
Most of the golf courses near me are pretty much this - densely forested areas with meticulously landscaped little gardens, which happens to have some holes built in.
As an environmentalist, fuck Kentucky bluegrass, fuck golf, and fuck lawns while we're at it
Las Vegas has something like 70 golf courses wasting inordinate amounts of water. Of course most houses also have outside private swimming pools too.
I don't care for golf and wish golf courses were better used spaces, but the thing about golf that makes it interesting is the meditative practice of being able to swing the club in just the right way to make the ball go where it needs to.
I like archery and you have the same sort of thing going on there. You have to have your positioning, movements, focus, and smoothness of action to hit the target. You can tell how you failed before the arrow hits the target. Working on fine tuning your actions is enjoyable.
archery
archery doesn't carry a racist history and waste giant tracts of land. they can putt-putt or get fucked.
I shot in highschool and it was the same thing. I loved it. You get into this extreme zen state and.become hyper aware of your own body. It was a lot of fun.
It isn't the same sort of thing though. Yes, you can pick a target and go for that, but having the topography and hazards makes for a different experience.
Driving ranges also don't have the same sort of socialization and competition aspect.
I agree with the first thing you said, but there's no reason why you can't socialize or compete at a driving range. It would be the same sort of competition as an archery or shooting competition- how accurately can you hit your target? And driving ranges have all the people doing it parallel to each other, so there's no reason why you can't talk to the person next to you. Yes, it is not exactly the same as golf, but it's more environmentally friendly and less of a barrier to people with lower income because you don't have to pay country club fees.
Fwiw golfers talk while they walk/cart around and such, and specifically are mad if anyone talks during their swing, the swing which is "the only thing you do at a driving range," so talking is a little less accepted there.
I live in Indiana, so there's (generally) no shortage of rain. The golf courses in this town still water the entire grass of the course every day. Even if it rained the day before. Even if it's raining right then and there. There aren't water shortages here, but what a waste.
Most courses use man made ponds as both hazards and as retention ponds so they can use that rain water.
You know what uses three times the amount of water per acre? Corn. And almonds use about ten times more water than corn. And people have only just started caring about lawns, that use two orders of magnitude more water, fertilizer, and land than golf courses.
Golf courses really aren't that bad from an ecological point of view when compared acre per acre to other large man made structures. They're generally pretty small when compared to other large landscaping projects at 30-80 acres. The issue is when a city has like twenty courses just for the purpose of driving up housing prices.
Would that land be better as a park? Probably, but this is the US, someone would see an unprofitable "empty" plot of land and throw million dollar houses on it.
You know what uses three times the amount of water per acre? Corn. And almonds use about ten times more water than corn.
And we get food out of that input, unlike a golf course where you get nothing of value.
And people have only just started caring about lawns, that use two orders of magnitude more water, fertilizer, and land than golf courses.
Have you seen a golf course before? They're literally lawns.
You get nothing of value from golf. I don't play either so neither do I, but this very much comes off as "stop liking things I don't like" rather than something that is actually important.
At least in the southwestern US most of them are a moot point. The vast majority of golf courses are being redeveloped because the course went bankrupt over the last decade or so. A few are managing to stick around, but I wouldn't be surprised if over 90% of the historical courses are gone in the next few years.
Most of the US corn crop goes to animal feed, so no you don't get food from it. At least not directly. If you totaled up all of the land used by golf courses, you'd be at .1% of just the amount of land used for animal feed. And about 1% of the land used by home lawns.
They're not that bad, there are much worse enemies than golf courses in general. Again, courses that are in the middle of a city that do nothing but increase property value are terrible, but most are perfectly fine and use way less water than you think.
Well I admit I haven't seen the entirety of those courses, but based on what I've seen, and considering they're surrounded by either businesses, houses or, in one case, a hospital, I don't know where those retention ponds would be. The hazards they have absolutely wouldn't be big enough to cover the amount of water I see sprayed on them.
I have never seen a golf course next to a hospital... Maybe it's regional, but near me, most courses have many made ponds that hold rain water and you can smell the pond water when the sprinklers come on. The ponds can hold several Olympic swimming pools worth of water.
I just don't understand the need for so many courses, I played golf as a kid on the same one for 10 years, the local environment allowed it to maintain itself for the most part.
I hear nuclear armageddon is fun, too.
What kind of parties are you going to?
They’ve been known to get pretty wild, I guess.
Well at least the radiation outfits come in very radiant party colors.
Eh, the OP is the one that made it a ratio of destruction to fun. Would have had the same impact if it said "Lunatics leveling miles of nature to thwhack a ball with a stick." but they chose to make a value judgment on the fun quotient of golf.
Well, that would very much depend on whether is a Mad Max style future or something else with fewer muscle cars...
Golf is a dying sport. Courses where I live have been closing, some have been turned into parks
Devil's advocate, in a dense suburban setting it keeps that land from being paved over and turned into a commercial zone. But when it is in a rural setting, absolutely.
I don't agree. It's not like the land being used in that urban setting is home to wildlife. It's not filled with trees. It's a giant lawn that gets watered every day and if you want to be there, you have to pay. I don't see that as being an improvement to anything else in a city.
Golf courses, at least the ones I've been to, have tons of trees. They're usually densely forested in the areas between holes to make a sort of barrier. And I certainly see more wildlife on a golf course than in, say, the parking lot of a strip mall.
I found a squirrel's nest on one course with about a hundred golf balls in it. And I've gotten chased off my tee shot by a bull elk.
Those animals are there despite the course, not because of the course. Golf courses are not wildlife habitats.
The High Line Park for one. There's also another huge park in central Manhattan you may have heard of, but the name escapes me.
I guess this is the internet and being deliberately obtuse is just to be expected. Pretty much every golf course in a highly urban area would just be more buildings if they didn't exist.
First of all, this...
dense suburban
...is an oxymoron.
Second, in the hierarchy of urban greenspace, golf courses are only one step up from the very bottom (just above private lawns).
Look at what people in NYC and north east NJ call suburban, then look at what someone in upstate NY calls suburban. Density is very different. Look at it as a scale. Dense Urban, Urban, light urban, dense suburban, suburban, etc. I am specifically pointing at places like in NJ where it would more likely be turned into a mall than a park.
What if it is slightly less dense than what you call dense? Then it's still the most dense suburban area possible. Clearly there are still varying levels of density within areas not dense enough to be urban.
If you want to preserve the land then make it a public park where everyone can enjoy it not just the rich jerks who can afford to pay to be there
Ideally sure, but we are dealing with capitalism. In a high populated area people will want to find a way to profit over every inch.
Golf is boring to watch. But for most players it is a social game. It's like going to a bar with a few friends, but getting a little exercise. And they don't do a ton of leveling. Costs too much, and using the land the way it is, is what makes a course unique and interesting.
That said, it would be easy to find a sport that destroys more natural land. Ever see a football, baseball or soccer stadium... including all the parking. Then realize how many baseball fields their are in america (or soccer fields in other countries). They are several times the number of golf courses, and they all need more parking each than one golf course.
it's really not in a large part of the country. In a desert sure. But even there they take measures like using recycled water and not pottable water and such. And of course agriculture makes every other water use pale in comparison.
Agriculture is food. We need food. We don't really need a way for a bunch of Wall Street bailouts queens to have a social activity.
sure we need food. But the way we water it is one of the more inefficient ways possible. But it is inexpensive. They could use almost 80% less water than they do. If you are worried about water use, start there. https://ag.umass.edu/vegetable/fact-sheets/irrigation-drip#:~:text=A%20properly%20installed%20drip%20system,subsurface%2C%20near%20the%20root%20zone.
Ok good. Start your own farm and do that. Golf isn't suddenly good because some farmers suck
The vast majority of golfers are regular people. Teachers, and people who do shift work have free time during the normal workday are some. Retires from all sorts of jobs are the rest of the majority. Most golf courses aren't as fancy as you see on tv, and they don't actually cost that much to play on. Wall street bailouts would never be caught dead on the average golf course.
I don't know a single regular person who can afford to spend 9 hours on a weekend golfing. The only people I know who can afford that are people who inherited millions of dollars.
You don't need to be a millionaire or need 9 hours to play golf. I used to have a game on an evening with my dad in the week, we were not at all wealthy.
Must be an incredible amazing coincidence that literally everyone I know who plays the game inherited piles of money. And all those greens being maintained and watered and cared for cost nothing so it's super cheap to play.
My buddy is a teacher in a poor district. He joins a golf league every year. Plays weekly at least when the weather is decent. My uncle plays weekly. Several guys on my softball team play. Not one of them has a million dollars. I play every few years or so. With no equipment meant it runs me $30 to $50 depending on where it is. Would be less if I owned clubs, or had a membership... haven't played since the pandemic, so I am sure the price has increased, but plenty of people spend more on drinks for one weekend.
Golf courses use a shit ton of water, especially in areas where grass isn't supposed to fuckin grow
yes in the desert they do. But most courses aren't in the desert. Plenty used to only water the greens in the middle of the summer in the northeast where I grew up. People usualy picture only the high end golf courses. Most are not that. Some used to just shut down for a while if it got too dry rather than water.
I think his point about the damage environmental damage golf courses cause pale in comparison to other sports that need arenas.
Have you seen a golf course? Most of them aren't made from scratch to fit some grand vision. They're usually set up working with the environment rather than against it.
I've been fishing on an old golf course that's no longer in use and it was mostly the same except the grass wasn't cut as low. Great outdoors spot for families.
I thought he was just saying there's way more stadiums than there are golf courses and that would be incorrect. I don't have a problem with golf courses except for the excessive amount of water they seem to waste.
Size of Old Trafford Football Stadium and all parking nearby: 20.8 hectares.
Size of my local small golf club: 53.3 hectares.
And that's one of the largest stadiums in the country, vs one of many, many golf courses.
Edit: For decimal place fuckup.
That is an absurdly massive golf club. Nowhere near average.
https://asgca.org/faq-how-much-land-do-i-need-to-build-a-golf-course/
Hang on, I've got my decimal point one over. For some reason I thought a hectare was 1,000m², and it's 10,000m².
So 20.8 vs 53.3 hectares.
But a basic bog-standard golf club is still over twice the size of one of the largest football stadiums in the country.
This entire thread is a blight on Lemmy. One of the seriously most shitty and disturbing things I’ve seen on the system.
I live in upstate New York, just about every town has a golf course. I personally love the game, but I honestly don't think their that bad for the environment up here. For many people it's their third place.
Like we get plenty of rain, and most I've been to are nestled near the edge of the forests. The APA regulates the shit out of what you can do. And it's really not much of a waste of land. If I want to go for a hike or trail run, I have dozens within biking distance and maybe even 100 within 30 minutes of driving.
It's farms and their cow shit fertilizer releasing gass and it's runoff polluting the watershed that's doing the most damage around here. But like I say, the APA does a pretty good job most of the time.
lol this moron thinks they don't fertilize the NEON GREEN grass that makes up almost every course.
goddamn that's dumb
I don't think you've seen how NEON GREEN the Adirondacks are. I get that they fertilize it. But really I don't think the environmental impact is particularly great around me.
What environmental impacts are there that I'm not thinking of for my area? And how severe are they? The way I see it, this area is one that can afford to have golf courses.
Yeah, I KNOW HOW NEON GREEN YOUR LAKES GET WHEN THE ALGAE BLOOMS COME IN.
https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/a-lake-in-crisis
Because of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, you fucking ignorant dolt. This is a REAL FUCKING PROBLEM even for you fortunate assholes up in the mountains.
https://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/67239.html
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/4/357/250240
https://harvardforest1.fas.harvard.edu/publications/pdfs/Driscoll_Environment_2003.pdf
The fertilizers still run down stream into the Raritan Bay watershed, LIS, hell every fucking waterway in the northeast.
Some of these fertilizers are critical to growing our fucking crops to feed people, so set aside your FUCKING INANE AND STUPID HOBBY for a moment and realize we gotta keep using them, we simply can't keep spraying them on putting greens so it runs down to the creek, into river, on into the bay or lake.
Look, I get it it's the Internet, but why all the insults?
I read the links and it seems to me that I was entirely correct. Runoff from farms is the primary source of nitrogen and other fertilizers in the waterways. I drive through Addison Vermont every day for work. You can smell the putrid rotting shit they spray on the fields. Vermont has rules around when you can spray shit, so that's why it smells worse than New York farms. Because it ferments in a pit or tank for a while before use.
I also did a preliminary search and it seems that golf courses have been reducing the amount of fertilizer used over the past couple of decades.
Source:
https://gcmonline.com/course/environment/news/nutrient-use-and-management-on-u.s.-golf-courses
So yes fertilizer is a problem. Farms need to figure out a way to reduce the runoff they produce. I probably just didn't read hard enough but how much of a problem are golf courses? How do they compare to other polluters?
So you're completely aware of the harm being done to play a fool's game, the waste of space and resources, the impact to the watershed, and your response is "yeah well how does it compare to other pollution" - FOR A FUCKING GAME?
AND YOU WONDER WHY I INSULT YOU?
if we have any descendents that live through the next millennium, they're going to wonder why it was so hard to just stop killing the planet, and one of the biggest reasons will be fuckwits like you who stood in the way. for fucking games.
I am asking, how bad is it?
The environment has a capacity to handle some pollution. If the pollution caused by golf courses is negligible then why should I care about something that pales in comparison to that which is causing real and apparent harm.
I see a couple of acres of grass that makes people happy. I see thousands of acres that are clearly damaging the environment that i love. Why should I care about the little bit that gets people outside enjoying the outdoors? Why do you sling insults instead of changing my mind? I'm open to change my mind, just have a conversation with me.
Are you a conservationist or a preservationist? Do you believe humans should enjoy the land we protect, or should humans be kept away from the natural world to protect it?
I'm a fucking rationalist and a realist. You're a delusionist apparently.
there's so many resources, we can spend them foolishly on bullshit that benefits few, or we can devote our energy, space and production to saving our own asses.
do the fucking math, and please, stop trying to convince me your milquetoast excuses are anything but "fuck you, I don't care" - because your indifference and petty justifications communicate loud and clear dipstick.
Two golf courses nearby have closed down and are being rehabilitated by the National Park that claimed the land or however they got it. IIRC one of them was family-owned for four generations, but the last owner was in his mid-twenties and got in way over his head, and committed suicide on one of the greens.
Sucks about the circumstances, but otherwise I love to see it